In the highly competitive race for termed-out State Sen. Jerry Hill’s District 13 seat in the 2020 election, polling predicts that Republican candidate Alex Glew (pictured on left) and Democrat Shelly Masur (right) will be the two candidates to win the California primary, according to a recent poll by EMC Research.
The emailed poll garnered responses from 709 likely Senate 13 District voters from Nov. 11-17.
Twenty-five percent of respondents said they would vote for Glew, a longtime mechanical engineer in Silicon Valley who currently serves on the Los Altos Design Review Commission, followed by 22 percent saying they’d vote for Masur, a former nonprofit executive who currently serves as a Redwood City councilmember.
Regardless of their party affiliation, the top two vote-getters in the California primary, set for March 3, 2020, will earn their spot on the ballot in the November 2020 election.
Glew is likely to earn a spot in the top two because, as the lone Republican, he’ll have consolidated support from voters in his party unlike his five Democratic opponents, according to EMC Research.
Still, Democrats tend to win District 13 in November, and Masur, who benefits from name-recognition and key endorsements by State Treasurer Fiona Ma, the California Teachers Association, and California Federation of Teachers, has emerged as an early favorite among her party’s voters, pollsters say.
Josh Becker, a Menlo Park resident who created the Full Circle Fund and serves on the California State Workforce Development Board, received support from 16 percent of voters. Former State Assemblymember and Mountain View mayor Sally Lieber had 9 percent; Michael Brownrigg, a two-term mayor and 10-year councilmember for the City of Burlingame, had 7 percent; and Annie Olivia, a realtor and Millbrae city councilmember, had 4 percent. Eighteen percent of the electorate, however, remain undecided, the poll suggests.
When additional information is provided to voters about all the candidates, Glew’s lead over Masur slightly narrows, 27 percent to 25 percent, and interest in nearly all other candidates tick slightly upward as well.
